Posted on 11/18/2004 5:22:48 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
John Kerry's family dumped millions of dollars of foreign holdings as he launched his White House bid, gobbling up Made in the USA stocks in a huge politically savvy international-to-domestic shift.
The investments, mostly in the name of Kerry's multimillionaire wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, sold stock in massive overseas players like Heineken, Sony, British Petroleum and Italian Telecom for red, white and blue companies like McDonald's, Dell and Kohls.
In all, the Kerrys dumped as much as $16 million worth of international stock and bought between $18 million and $32 million in domestic holdings between 2002 and 2003, records show.
The swaps, detailed in Kerry's financial disclosures for the presidential race, come to light as the Bay State senator tonight wraps himself in Americana to accept the Democratic Party nomination.
The senator's campaign said the investments are managed not by the Kerrys but by professional investment managers for the family trustees - of which Heinz Kerry is only one.
Marla Romash, a senior adviser to Kerry, said the financial decisions aren't political.
``The trustees and Mrs. Heinz Kerry have asked these investment managers, who make their own investment decisions, only to take appropriate steps to ensure that investments are responsible and financially prudent,'' Romash said. ``The trustees review these investments periodically with the managers to ensure that these investments are responsible as well as financially prudent.''
But the timing of the sales appears to be an anomaly among a relatively consistent investment pattern.
Through most of Kerry's federal disclosure forms, the Heinz Kerry trusts - which invest some of the massive inheritance after the death of her first husband, Sen. H. John Heinz III, more than a decade ago - show steady investments and sales of overseas assets.
In the spring of 2002, as Kerry seriously began weighing a presidential run, there appeared to be a marked increase in sales of overseas holdings.
The forms, which only list a range of figures, show the trusts sold between $7.2 million and $16.1 million in assets that year. The trust reported dividends of as much as $68,000 on the sales.
Among the assets dropped were: Cadbury Schweppes, the British candy and soda maker - with between $50,001 and $100,000 in stock sold in March 2002; Japan's Canon, Sony and Toyota - with more than $100,000 in each sold in March 2002; and France's Vivendi, Total Fina, Suez and Compagnie De Saint-Gobain.
The records also show the trust sold between $250,001 and $500,000 of BNP Paribas stock in April 2002, before the French bank was ensnared in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations.
Later that year and in 2003, the trusts began bolstering its domestic holdings - buying more than $50,000 in Harley Davidson stock, more than $100,000 in Costco, more than $250,000 in Kohls, Raytheon, and Kraft Foods, and as much as $1 million in Dell and McDonald's.
Right.
KERRY WAS NEVER THE REAL DEAL ABOUT ANYTHING.
"The records also show the trust sold between $250,001 and $500,000 of BNP Paribas stock in April 2002, before the French bank was ensnared in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations."
Very interesting.
The Kerrys personally profited from the oil-for-palaces scandal.
Kerry is still a whining fake, but this is just her portfolio managers doing their job.
I wonder if Kerry's family has any connections to the French Bank.
Kerry & his wife are garbage.
As in overflowing and stinkin' to high heaven.....
...from what I have seen of them, they don't have a clue about anything and that includes investing...
actually this is probably all coincidence...but it does appear that the trust's money managers were planning on a Bush victory.
Markets love certainty...and that ain't little Johnnie Kerry...the only thing certain about him is his waffling and multitude of positions on every issue.
He would have been awful for the market.
I question the timing....
Ah, finally!
Now we know who drives the SUV's.
LVM
Oh my! That's very entertaining.
Kerry a total fraud through and through!
Exactly. Last night I was forced to watch Colmes argue that at this time there was no concrete evidence they were noncompliant in administering the program. The guest simply reinstated his point time and time again, we on on the verge of that conclusion. The French, Liberals brothers, are about to be named as participants in the scandal!
As I understand the situation, Mrs. Heinz-Kerry is worth about $1,000,000,000.00. Let me be conservative and say that she is worth half of that sum or $500,000,000.00. If Mrs. Heinz-Kerry sold $16,000,000.00 in foreign stocks as alleged in this article and purchased as much as $32,000,000.00 in domestic stocks then she moved only 3.20% of her wealth out of foreign stocks. At the most, she only invested an additional 6.40% of her net worth in domestic firms.
While are a lot of things to say bad about Mrs. Heinz-Kerry, there is nothing here that I see that any rational person can use to condemn the woman.
Of course, I have been wrong before and I have had my evening martini, (One part vermouth, Five parts gin from the freezer, and five good olives in a chilled glass). Consequently my faculties are not as sharp now as they were at 5:00 this afternoon, so feel free to correct my logic or my math.
Respectfully submitted,
Tom D.
Notice the word "trusts"? Perhaps that is why the bitch showed only $5 million gain on about a billion dollars of assets. And even with the $5 million income, she only paid 12% income tax on it.
Oh for pity's sake! I wish the Leftists would at least TRY to treat us like we know what the hell is going on. It's bad enough that they insult our integrity. Now they think they're entitled to insult our intelligence? Criminy.
Raytheon, huh? This should slay some of the anti-war, anti-defense liberal idiots. And yes, Kerry might not have supported defense spending in the Senate, but he surely did in his portfolio :-).
"Very interesting."
Yep. A smoking gun if I ever saw one. "Insider Trading" is transparent.
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